“Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold This flowery plat, the sweet recess of Eve Thus early, thus alone. Her heavenly form Angelic, but more soft and feminine, Her graceful innocence, her every air Of gesture or least action, overawed His malice, and with rapine sweet bereaved His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought. That space the Evil One abstracted stood From his own evil, and for the time remained Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed, Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge.” (IX. 455–466.) Even here the idea of the inferiority of Eve’s beauty enters into the description; but a few lines below it makes itself even more strongly felt. Because her beauty is without its power to inspire awe and terror, Satan reasons that she is the proper one to tempt. “Then let me not let pass Occasion which now smiles. Behold alone The Woman, opportune to all attempts— Her husband, for I view far round, not nigh, Whose higher intellectual more I shun. · · · · · She fair, divinely fair, fit love for Gods, Not terrible, though terror be in love And beauty, not approached by stronger hate, Hate stronger under show of love well feigned.” (IX. 479–492.) In this contemplative love of beauty there is present as a noticeable element the consciousness in the poet’s mind of the moral significance of beauty. In Spenser’s description of the first meeting of Calidore with Pastorella, however, the contemplative love of beauty so absorbs the power of the soul that the lover and the poet are oblivious to every other thought and silently gaze upon the beauty of form present to their eyes. Calidore sees Pastorella on a little hillock surrounded by maidens, she lovelier than all. “So stood he still long gazing thereupon, Ne any will had thence to move away, Although his quest were farre afore him gon; But after he had fed, yet did he stay, And sate there still, untill the flying day Was farre forth spent.” (VI. ix. 12.) So Satan stands before the happy pair in Paradise. His will toward them is far otherwise than Calidore’s toward Pastorella; but his contemplative love of their beauty is one in spirit with the youthful lover’s.